Introduction

This is a follow up episode on Home Assistant (HA), see

hpr4099

:: An introduction to Home Assistant (HA) for an explanation of what

Home Assistant (HA) is, and why you might want to install it.

The Home

Assistant Installation page offers several different install

methods, listed along with the level of difficulty.

Easiest: Plug and play with Home Assistant Green

Easy: DIY with Raspberry Pi

Intermediate: Extend with Home Assistant Yellow

Hard: Install on other hardware

Expert: Advanced installation methods

Today we will be installing Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS),

on a x86-64 machine.

Home Assistant can be repurposed and installed on various hardware,

such as an Odroid or a generic x86-64 machine. The Home Assistant

Operating System allows you to install Home Assistant on these devices

even if you have little to no Linux experience.

We are going to my HP t610 Flexible Thin Client, which has a 16GB

SATA Flash Drive, and I upgraded it to 16G of Ram.

Note that this will install Home Assistant Operating

System (HAOS) as a computer appliance. That means that it will run a

bare OS with the various components in a customised docker setup. It

will take over the entire computer, and requires secure boot to be

disabled.

On the HP t610 Flexible Thin Client, that involves pressing "Esc" at

boot to get to the bootup menu. If that doesn't work try pressing "F10"

just after turning on the power.

Two methods to install

HAOS has no integrated installer like you would expect with

distro

hopping, but it requires that the image be burned directly onto the

disk of the computer itself.

It has two methods to do this and "Method 2: Installing HAOS directly

from a boot medium", is basically take the disk out of the target system

and attach it to your own computer. The use a burning tool like Balena

Etcher, or dd to write the image to disk. Much as you would

burn a sdcard for a raspberry pi. I don't have a way to do this so let's

go with method 1.

Method

1: Installing HAOS via Ubuntu booting from a USB flash drive

Here you download and burn live operating system as you would if you

were

distro

hopping, the document suggests to use Ubuntu. I tried it but my HP

t610 Flexible Thin Client didn't like it. It also didn't like Fedora

despite having worked earlier, so I just used

Debian

LXQT.

https://www.debian.org/download

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-12.5.0-amd64-lxqt.iso

Now you have Debian running off a usb stick on your target

machine.

Steps

to burn Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS) to disk on target

Anything after the '#' character is a comment and doesn't need to be

typed.

Note The following steps are optional, and you

should only do them if you wish to ssh to the target machine from your

pc.

# Anything after the '#' charachter is a comment and doesn't need to be typed.

apt install openssh-server # Install the ssh s